Thanks for watching. Did you own an Amstrad MegaPC? Do you know if the 486 version made it to market or have you upgraded your own? Was a hybrid PC/MegaDrive ever a good idea? Leave your comments! If you enjoy my content and would like to show support for The Cave then here's how you can help: ● Support RMC on Patreon: www.patreon.com/RetroManCave ● Treat me to a Coffee with Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/retromancave ● Leave a tip on Paypal: paypal.me/RetroManCave Thank you! Neil - RMC
I don't think the Amstrad version had much of a point. - it's literally just a PC and a Mega Drive in a single case... Amusing gimmick, but utterly pointless But the TeraDrive would have been interesting... If it wasn't so woefully underpowered. A 286 in 1993? Yeah, no.
I had one but never saw the 486 version for sale (except for the adverts in Amstrad Action, including the price-reduced adverts that also advertised a price-dropped 486 version) so I have a feeling it would have been mostly a by-request thing.
I had the 386sx 25Mhz version. Took me ages to save up for it and was so poor spec it really did not do what I needed it to, guess I just didn't understand PC spec back then :-)
@@Ezyasnos sort of. Yes the Xbone and PS4 are x86 based but they are not 100% like a PC. The PS4 has a nonstandard Southbridge that is controlled by an ARM CPU, and if I recall both lack a lot of legacy features like support for PS/2 mice and keyboards. Because of that they are very much still their own types of devices, but they are closer to PCs than they have ever been.
This was my first PC when I was a child, absolutely loved it. Always thought my old man had left it in his loft so I started searching for it this year so I could refurbish it and get it working again but it looks as though he must of chucked it out along with the monitor at some point :( Have been searching for one on eBay all year so pretty jealous you managed to find one
This has to be the raddest computer I've ever seen. The Genesis played a huge part in my gaming youth, as did the 386. To have them in one unit would have been incredible. Never knew this existed. Gorgeous! Thanks so much for another great lesson RMC!!!
I had one of these, bought from some store, maybe it was Tandys, I don't fully remember. It was really neat for someone who was predominately a console gamer, for getting in to some PC gaming too. I remember I upgraded it with 4MB Ram and a Soundblaster 2 Pro. One of the really cool things was getting to play MegaDrive games on that monitor, way better than a MD looked on a TV. I recall one time, my PC gamer friend was teaching me how to play Dune II, and he had to go home for lunch, so I just slid the front panel over, and played some Sega while he was gone, and when he got back, slid it back again, and the game was waiting right where we left it. I don't think it was mentioned, but the panel below the cartridge port pops off, to reveal a connector for a MegaCD, provided you could get the special cable for it... I think that may have also required some special cart to jump start that too.
Thanks for sharing your memories, a soundblaster card would be a great addition to it. The expansion slot gets a mention in part 2, but the special cart is quite funny, the only thing special about it is that it pushes the switch down to turn the MD on... It's a dummy cart!
I bought my first PC in 1993, and it was a 40MHz 386SX, total cost about £500. How Amstrad thought they'd sell a machine half the speed for twice the price, even with a MegaDrive bolted on, is beyond me.
The price differences between US, Japan and Europe were gigantic back then and especially in Central-Europe (due to 'clever' salesmen) behaved like a yoyo from 4-digits nono to we-need-the-space twenty-left buy-a-cheapstake-solo-gogo ... well, kinda .. i ... think???
This channel is brilliant. I've never really understood why it has only 1/3 the subscribers of Nostalgia Nerd - similar channels, similar content. If anything, I feel this channel goes deeper into the matter at hand.
Time? It's a simple fact of life that getting subscribers on youtube takes time. If you compare someone who started 3 years ago against someone who started 7 years ago, what do you expect to see?
@@KuraIthys The oldest video on this channel is 7 years old, while the oldest video on Nostalgia Nerd is only 4 years old - so I expected to see this channel have the most subscribers by a solid margin.
@@KuraIthys Time has got shit-all to do with it. It's if your video gets featured. Make a video that the UA-cam automated god's spot and before you know it 5,000 subs becomes near 100,000. That guy who has the catchphrase"here's the scoop" (forget his name) is a fine example. Went from a few hundred subscribers to 6 figures in the space of a few days.
At Amstrad we also had a teradrive and we worked close with sega Japan and I spoke to them personally few times due to issues with some games crapping out during gameplay which we eventually fixed and I went out to a few customers to patch them.
I worked for Amstrad from 91 till they sold the PC division to Viglen. I don’t remember a 486 version hit retail. I assume it would have used the 486SLC chip so allow the use of the same 386 board. Just like the PC7486.
I used to have one of these as a kid. Grate memory's. With respect of the 15khz screen you could look for a NEC Accusync 71v as this has a 15khz mode that should work grate with this. Cheers for the Vid.
Or just go the Amiga route and get a scandoubler. Toss up as to what would be cheaper, an increasingly rare multisync, or a generic monitor plus an OSSC. Wouldn't even need to disconnect it in PC mode as almost any worthwhile monitor should be able to sync double-frequency VGA these days. Or maybe just a VGA-SCART adapter as used to connect 15khz RGB sources to data projectors, and either a cheap secondhand projector (who doesn't want an 8x6ft game of Sonic?), or a couple of gender changers, a switchbox and a TV. Shouldn't be too difficult to fit a couple of small LCDs together in the same sort of space a single CRT used to reserve. Just flip from one to the other as needed. ... in fact, no. Just get a regular small-to-midsize TV that also has a VGA input. Get a VGA Y-cable and the aforementioned adapter. Plug both loose ends into the TV, and just swap between "AV1" and "PC" inputs. Job done.
The first PC I used to play games was an Amstrad Mega PC. It must have been late 1993. I wasn't very technically minded back then, I just remember that it played X-Wing like a dream. Also, The Mega Drive graphics looked super sharp on the VGA monitor. Much sharper than on the usual 14 - 15" TV's that sat in most UK kids bedrooms of that era. I was quite jealous of my friend at the time! Awesome video!
I think that was the main point, that you didn't need to use a TV for the Megadrive. I keep thinking that if they had built a TV into this it would have covered all bases. Amstrad sold a TV tuner for the CPCs monitor and years later Sony did a TV with a Playstation 2 built in so it wouldn't have been too radical an idea
If you wanted some more history. I worked for a company who bought all of the Amstrad rights and stock after Sugar wanted rid. It was then called Edcom and was based in Streatham. We used to mainly do floppy conversions to 3.5 and so on. I left the company in 2000 to go off to the USA but yes, we had a lot of Amstrad stuff. You would be surprised just how many older folk wanted these things repaired and working. We did a butt load of printers too, which was usually sanding and "fluffing up" the rubber paper feeders (which was what used to go on them).
I always loved the weird little mergers that came out like this in the 80s and 90s. It seems there were a lot more companies willing to take risks and do "weird" things like this, even if they didn't always pan out or make a lot of sense....it was still better than yet another same looking smartphone or the same computer with a different logo with RGB lighting. At least there was a drive to be the "next big thing". Seems now like technology has reached a plateau and we're just maintaining the same status quo.
I wanted one of these so badly as a teenager, in 1992 my late father was still convinced my older brothers CPC6128 was cutting edge (because the bloke from DIXONS told him so!), and everyone else had the Megadrive or SNES. It was never to be sadly.
Can't wait for the next video. What an interesting piece of history. Subscribed. Honestly, if I saw it around (was old enough) and had the money, I'd have got one. The idea seems sound, and as a Sega lover, would have peaked my interest.
Nice repair job. ;) I remember seeing a Mega PC sat taking pride-of-place in my local Tandy shop in the 90s. I don't think they sold very many. lol (we already owned a couple of PCs and a Mega Drive back then, but I still thought the Mega PC looked awesome.) Still a great collector's piece, so it's great to see one restored.
I think the included "multisync" monitor made a clicking sound as it switched between the 15 KHz and 31 KHz modes. So it probably had a relay in there to change the inductance of the yoke?
Thanks Ash, lot's more tidying up to come in pt2. Of course in the time it took to make this video you would likely have designed a new one from scratch 😂🖒
One thing that always sticks out to me from your videos is the music. It's always really good. Everything else about your vids is good too, just to be clear!
This really caught my interest. Enough to comment. I was aware of the TeraDrive but not an Amstrad version, much less that the sound chip would be adlib compatible. I would love to see everything in action in PT 2.
Only just getting round to watching this (having a baby has really messed with my youtube backlog), I used to drool over the mega pc in Dixons back in the day. Great vid as always, thanks!
I think we saw it advertised, of all places, in ST Format. Or maybe it was just the Argos catalogue? Either way, it seemed like something from another planet, to kids used to a machine that was essentially built around what could be considered a subset of the Megadrive hardware... You mean you get a *full* MD, AND a (seemingly) 3x faster, "32 bit" computer into the bargain? Damn, son. The future is now.
I remember it back in the day, but I just now realized that it was (and probably is until today) the only computer that actually combined a Z80, a Motorolla 68000 and an 8086 architecture processor on the same machine.
It was the strangest thing to see as a kid in the 90s who owned a MD . A shop in my area had one and batman on it which i couldnt find anywhere else . Made the mega-pc feel pretty surreal to play on
You know i had always wondered if you could make a pcb card of all consoles ... and plug them into a pc glad to see someone thought about it as well and made this product
I'm always amazed by the amount of varieties of Mega Drive over any other consoles before or since. Inc the US released Nomad (handheld MD). Plus the MD/MCD and 32X combos. Even Sega were still making it with the Mega LD when they were developing the Saturn.
Nice video. I nearly bought one of these back in the day as Dixon's were clearing them out for a few hundred dollars. Instead I bought a crazy expensive SCSI CD Drive for my Falcon lol.
Love it! Thanks for the cleaning guide. I have a Vendex Turbo-888-XT with similar corrosion on the floppy pins. Looks like I will be removing those too!
Something I recently discovered for covering circuit board traces after doing work on them is UV settable solder mask paint. It only costs about AU$2-3 from eBay and is available in multiple colours, including the common green colour. I'd recommend this for anybody's tool kit if they are repairing boards like in this video where they have to scrape off solder mask.
ironically as a kid, I once drew up designs for a Sega Genesis and PC Combo machine (iirc it had a cd-rom drive and modem port)...its funny to find out that they actually existed. Fantastic video as always though
I drew up designs for a laptop that had two touchscreens instead of a keyboard. That exists too... Although it came about roughly 20 years after I thought of it - I have one nearby. I mean, it's not a great idea, in practice, but it absolutely does look awesome. XD (Acer Iconia 6120 in case you're wondering what the 'real' version of the idea is.) A bunch of companies are on the verge of trying to release new adaptations of the idea though. Asus has one in the works (they call it project precog) And Lenovo is working on a small folding screen laptop, which is still conceptually kind of similar... So... I guess I was less crazy than I thought, if 30 years later, several companies seem hell-bent on getting the idea to work... XD
It's amazing to me that this thing exists! In c+vg there was an April Fools article on something called the "Famstrad", which was like a SNES/Amstrad hybrid. My brother and I would laugh about it throughout the 90's.. completely unaware that Amstrad more or less actually did it haha
Really enjoyed this, thanks! You know what I'd love to see some time? A video about the most prominent computer manufacturer from my childhood: Research Machines. They made computers primarily for schools. I remember starting with the RM Link 380 and 480Z at secondary school before they migrated to RM Nimbus 80186 almost-IBM-compatible machines in the mid 80s. At college I mostly used their PC-AX (I think it was called) which was a 286 machine. Have you ever heard of them?
Another great trash to treasure! As a Sega fanboy in Canada, I've always wanted on of these, but have easily talked myself out of it due to import costs haha
Ah, the days of playing Wing Commander and then flipping over to Speedball or Desert Strike was special. Yes, I was one who had the 486 variant and (was it?) the 40MB HDD at the time. I think I still have the system somewhere. Come to think about it, I had the PC1512 before it, the CPC6128 and even that funky eMailer such was the thing for all Amstrad back then. Thanks for a little nostalgia.
cool feature with having the PC side stay on while playing an MD game - you could pull up a walk-through or strategy guide for the game on the early internet and then switch back to reference it as needed
This was a great video. I didn't know these even existed and i consider myself knowledgeable in retro tech. So today I learned i'm not all knowing! lol
I had one of these, back in the day. If only the PC was a little more current, it would have been quite a nice product... You know, for people working from home who like a little "down time", now-and-then. However, this was still a nice, soldered trip down memory lane, for me. Thanks!
This was the best PC I even owned and I regret selling in the 90s for £50. It wasn't the fastest but it was fun to use. I even had a DOS version of COBOL for it. I think I had it from 93-95, as 95 I got a new job and could afford p75.
The adverts for the Mega PC in Sonic the Comic definitely boasted a 486 SLC "plus" version as available to order for £200 more (or £300 more with a bigger HDD). I used to stare longingly at those ads so can remember them pretty photographically! They were sold by Silica systems, not Amstrad themselves.
Yes they did, but that was THEIR own mod. Amstrad NEVER offered this from the factory. It was nothing more than a clip-on 486 upgrade. They just coined the "Plus" moniker as Amstrsd previously used this to denote their upgraded/updated machines.
@@R33Racer I suspected this, especially as it was a 486 SLC and therefore probably the identical motherboard. That's why I specified the adverts were from Silica, rather than Amstrad directly. Thanks for clarifying/confirming my suspicions!
To be honest they did not sell that well, this is how one Xmas we managed to get a job lot of 200 of them dirt cheap, and it was Xmas so we flogged them at £199.99 and we sold the lot in about 2 weeks ans we could have moved at least another 100 but we could not get any more stock, but many kids were going to get one of these from Santa that Xmas :)
I'm lucky to have a Mega PC and a working CRT. The PC part isn't that fast, but it's pretty compact and has some nice features like Adlib sound (via the Megadrive card), volume wheel for PC Speaker, ...
Plenty of people were buying 386s in 1993. I bought one as a student; the AMD 386DX40 was somewhere between the speed of a 486SX25 and 33, but was over a hundred pounds cheaper than the 486.
You may want to be careful with the purple logo on the front if you retrobrite it. I had a similar thing with a white Sega Saturn where it bleached out the red part of the logo leaving it yellow.
Also, you say this has been upgraded with RAM but mine 100% came with 4mb as standard. I got it rather late in its lifespan though so maybe they sold them with more ram later on?
Be careful in that Multisync was / is an NEC trademark. As resolutions got higher they started putting the name on monitors that wouldn't go below VGA.
The Alan Sugar moments are made of Techmoan-level sarcasm and sass-practically worth the price of admission. But looking at this PC is great! I was only ever aware of the Sega Saturn PCI card thanks to LGR, and this device is news to me.
The Samsung SyncMaster 204 or 204B will handle the 15kHz signals by interpreting them as a 480i resolution. I've been able to use my own Sega Genesis (Megadrive for you) with this monitor and many other older video game consoles over RGB with it with an excellent picture quality.
I think the difficulty would be in sorting out licencing rather than technical. The same reason you can't get a combined Playstation / X Box despite them both using very similar AMD processors.
I do remember someone from first school who had one of these. She used it as a lure to get me into her bedroom. I'm not sure it went exactly as planned, I thoroughly enjoyed switching between Sonic and Wolfenstein 3D in the early 90s. She didn't get any. Ahh what it was to be 9 years old 🤣
When I worked for Dixons and we were selling these, almost all of them came back within a few months due to a fault. Usually the door would stop switching between the Megadrive and PC. Curiously, and this is a little background on Dixons workings, these were classed as "code 5." In our book of products that contained all our items, product codes and prices etc they would also have a repair code. Code 1 meant the customer has to arrange an engineer to come out to the house. Code 2 was send it away to Disastercare...I mean Mastercare. Code 5 meant just swap the damn thing and send the faulty one back to the warehouse. I guess even Dixons couldn't be bothered to repair them.
I'm not an expert but i think IBM's PS2 machines used an internal bus called MCA or Micro Channel Architecture which was different from the usual ISA (Industrial Standard Architecture); perhaps this difference in the buses made the PS2 machines more efficient. Hopefully an expert will see this and correct me.
386DX40 would be faster than a 486SX25 for example. The 486 in itself wasn't a huge leap in performance until they started increasing the internal clock
@@ubergeeknz it saw it with my very eyes my friend made it a point to show off his full size IBM PS2 386 vs his mid tower 486. I was in awe, at the PS2 this was back in 1998, but the year is irrelevant.
Thanks for watching. Did you own an Amstrad MegaPC? Do you know if the 486 version made it to market or have you upgraded your own? Was a hybrid PC/MegaDrive ever a good idea? Leave your comments!
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Thank you!
Neil - RMC
I don't think the Amstrad version had much of a point. - it's literally just a PC and a Mega Drive in a single case...
Amusing gimmick, but utterly pointless
But the TeraDrive would have been interesting... If it wasn't so woefully underpowered.
A 286 in 1993? Yeah, no.
I didn't own it I just looked at it admiringly in Tandy.
I had one but never saw the 486 version for sale (except for the adverts in Amstrad Action, including the price-reduced adverts that also advertised a price-dropped 486 version) so I have a feeling it would have been mostly a by-request thing.
@@remlap It's funny how that happens, isn't it? For me it was "shall I play Sonic again, or Civilisation?" Civilisation usually won.
I had the 386sx 25Mhz version. Took me ages to save up for it and was so poor spec it really did not do what I needed it to, guess I just didn't understand PC spec back then :-)
"So do you have a PC or a console for games?"
"Yes"
PC blended with a console master race!
And consoles are literally PC's nowadays.
@@Ezyasnos sort of. Yes the Xbone and PS4 are x86 based but they are not 100% like a PC. The PS4 has a nonstandard Southbridge that is controlled by an ARM CPU, and if I recall both lack a lot of legacy features like support for PS/2 mice and keyboards. Because of that they are very much still their own types of devices, but they are closer to PCs than they have ever been.
A Silicon Graphics keyboard on an Amstrad. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. :)
It's a pity Alan never thought to release his closing monologue over the end credits music as a dance track in the 90s. He'd have made a fortune!
This was my first PC when I was a child, absolutely loved it. Always thought my old man had left it in his loft so I started searching for it this year so I could refurbish it and get it working again but it looks as though he must of chucked it out along with the monitor at some point :(
Have been searching for one on eBay all year so pretty jealous you managed to find one
There's been plenty listed.
Just in the last few years, they've been fetching stupid money.
Love the Alan sugar Yorkshire/cockney accent. Lol
richaw11 Same hair.
Yorkshire/cockney accent those two places are nowhere near each other to have such a accent lol
Sounded more like Ricky Jervais hocked up on cough syrup trying to do a London accent to me.
This has to be the raddest computer I've ever seen. The Genesis played a huge part in my gaming youth, as did the 386. To have them in one unit would have been incredible. Never knew this existed. Gorgeous! Thanks so much for another great lesson RMC!!!
I had one of these, bought from some store, maybe it was Tandys, I don't fully remember. It was really neat for someone who was predominately a console gamer, for getting in to some PC gaming too. I remember I upgraded it with 4MB Ram and a Soundblaster 2 Pro. One of the really cool things was getting to play MegaDrive games on that monitor, way better than a MD looked on a TV. I recall one time, my PC gamer friend was teaching me how to play Dune II, and he had to go home for lunch, so I just slid the front panel over, and played some Sega while he was gone, and when he got back, slid it back again, and the game was waiting right where we left it. I don't think it was mentioned, but the panel below the cartridge port pops off, to reveal a connector for a MegaCD, provided you could get the special cable for it... I think that may have also required some special cart to jump start that too.
Thanks for sharing your memories, a soundblaster card would be a great addition to it. The expansion slot gets a mention in part 2, but the special cart is quite funny, the only thing special about it is that it pushes the switch down to turn the MD on... It's a dummy cart!
I bought my first PC in 1993, and it was a 40MHz 386SX, total cost about £500. How Amstrad thought they'd sell a machine half the speed for twice the price, even with a MegaDrive bolted on, is beyond me.
The price differences between US, Japan and Europe were gigantic back then and especially in Central-Europe (due to 'clever' salesmen) behaved like a yoyo from 4-digits nono to we-need-the-space twenty-left buy-a-cheapstake-solo-gogo ... well, kinda .. i ... think???
This channel is brilliant. I've never really understood why it has only 1/3 the subscribers of Nostalgia Nerd - similar channels, similar content. If anything, I feel this channel goes deeper into the matter at hand.
Time?
It's a simple fact of life that getting subscribers on youtube takes time.
If you compare someone who started 3 years ago against someone who started 7 years ago, what do you expect to see?
@@KuraIthys The oldest video on this channel is 7 years old, while the oldest video on Nostalgia Nerd is only 4 years old - so I expected to see this channel have the most subscribers by a solid margin.
@@KuraIthys Time has got shit-all to do with it. It's if your video gets featured.
Make a video that the UA-cam automated god's spot and before you know it 5,000 subs becomes near 100,000.
That guy who has the catchphrase"here's the scoop" (forget his name) is a fine example. Went from a few hundred subscribers to 6 figures in the space of a few days.
At Amstrad we also had a teradrive and we worked close with sega Japan and I spoke to them personally few times due to issues with some games crapping out during gameplay which we eventually fixed and I went out to a few customers to patch them.
"Will it blend?" I haven't laughed that hard at a youtube video in a long time! Thank you! Always looking forward to your next video.
lol yeah, I completely wasn't ready for that.
Wow I remember a friend buying one of these brand new, and thinking to myself why didn't he buy a better PC and a separate mega drive lol
I like how the gun is neatly hanging between those two electrical switches. ^.^
Totally! Caught it a millisecond in, as if it was hammering into my brain - L O O K _ D U D E ; H A N G _ T E N _ H O N E Y; W A T C H _ M E !
I worked for Amstrad from 91 till they sold the PC division to Viglen. I don’t remember a 486 version hit retail. I assume it would have used the 486SLC chip so allow the use of the same 386 board. Just like the PC7486.
I used to have one of these as a kid. Grate memory's. With respect of the 15khz screen you could look for a NEC Accusync 71v as this has a 15khz mode that should work grate with this. Cheers for the Vid.
Or just go the Amiga route and get a scandoubler. Toss up as to what would be cheaper, an increasingly rare multisync, or a generic monitor plus an OSSC. Wouldn't even need to disconnect it in PC mode as almost any worthwhile monitor should be able to sync double-frequency VGA these days.
Or maybe just a VGA-SCART adapter as used to connect 15khz RGB sources to data projectors, and either a cheap secondhand projector (who doesn't want an 8x6ft game of Sonic?), or a couple of gender changers, a switchbox and a TV. Shouldn't be too difficult to fit a couple of small LCDs together in the same sort of space a single CRT used to reserve. Just flip from one to the other as needed.
... in fact, no. Just get a regular small-to-midsize TV that also has a VGA input. Get a VGA Y-cable and the aforementioned adapter. Plug both loose ends into the TV, and just swap between "AV1" and "PC" inputs. Job done.
The first PC I used to play games was an Amstrad Mega PC. It must have been late 1993. I wasn't very technically minded back then, I just remember that it played X-Wing like a dream. Also, The Mega Drive graphics looked super sharp on the VGA monitor. Much sharper than on the usual 14 - 15" TV's that sat in most UK kids bedrooms of that era. I was quite jealous of my friend at the time!
Awesome video!
It played TIE Fighter even better.... even if it did take up half of the space on the 40 MB hard drive!
I think that was the main point, that you didn't need to use a TV for the Megadrive. I keep thinking that if they had built a TV into this it would have covered all bases. Amstrad sold a TV tuner for the CPCs monitor and years later Sony did a TV with a Playstation 2 built in so it wouldn't have been too radical an idea
I used one of these in the early 90s, I thought it was pretty mad at the time, cool old machine 😎
You do realise you're putting a lot more thought and care into this than the original designers? Love that
Dreamt about having one of these, regularly saw them in the back of gaming mags but knw even then the price was ridiculous for what was offered.
If you wanted some more history. I worked for a company who bought all of the Amstrad rights and stock after Sugar wanted rid. It was then called Edcom and was based in Streatham. We used to mainly do floppy conversions to 3.5 and so on. I left the company in 2000 to go off to the USA but yes, we had a lot of Amstrad stuff. You would be surprised just how many older folk wanted these things repaired and working. We did a butt load of printers too, which was usually sanding and "fluffing up" the rubber paper feeders (which was what used to go on them).
And yes, it was probably us who changed the controller board on the HDD.
I remember being so close to buying a Mega PC from Tandy. Really interesting bit of kit.
I always loved the weird little mergers that came out like this in the 80s and 90s. It seems there were a lot more companies willing to take risks and do "weird" things like this, even if they didn't always pan out or make a lot of sense....it was still better than yet another same looking smartphone or the same computer with a different logo with RGB lighting. At least there was a drive to be the "next big thing". Seems now like technology has reached a plateau and we're just maintaining the same status quo.
Very interesting and informative video! Can't believe you managed to get big Al to do the voice over parts! good job!
I wanted one of these so badly as a teenager, in 1992 my late father was still convinced my older brothers CPC6128 was cutting edge (because the bloke from DIXONS told him so!), and everyone else had the Megadrive or SNES. It was never to be sadly.
Can't wait for the next video. What an interesting piece of history. Subscribed. Honestly, if I saw it around (was old enough) and had the money, I'd have got one. The idea seems sound, and as a Sega lover, would have peaked my interest.
Absolutely wicked. What a great curiosity. Can't believe you got Alan to guest appear, this channel really has come on in recent months!
Another video about an interesting piece of hardware. Very enjoyable, as always. Looking forward to part 2.
Nice repair job. ;)
I remember seeing a Mega PC sat taking pride-of-place in my local Tandy shop in the 90s.
I don't think they sold very many. lol
(we already owned a couple of PCs and a Mega Drive back then, but I still thought the Mega PC looked awesome.)
Still a great collector's piece, so it's great to see one restored.
I think the included "multisync" monitor made a clicking sound as it switched between the 15 KHz and 31 KHz modes.
So it probably had a relay in there to change the inductance of the yoke?
Thanks Ash, lot's more tidying up to come in pt2. Of course in the time it took to make this video you would likely have designed a new one from scratch 😂🖒
Thank you so much for this guide. I just got an A500 and was able to remove the leaking battery because of this video. Have a coffee, my treat.
Thanks so much Jon I appreciate it greatly. Part 2 will be out soon and may offer you more help on further cleaning if needed 🖒
One thing that always sticks out to me from your videos is the music. It's always really good. Everything else about your vids is good too, just to be clear!
This really caught my interest. Enough to comment. I was aware of the TeraDrive but not an Amstrad version, much less that the sound chip would be adlib compatible. I would love to see everything in action in PT 2.
I vividly remember running TIE Fighter on the PC side and hearing that wonderful soundtrack emanating from the Mega Drive sound chip...
Only just getting round to watching this (having a baby has really messed with my youtube backlog), I used to drool over the mega pc in Dixons back in the day. Great vid as always, thanks!
Fascinating video as always Neil! I also liked the impromptu Sugar Beat at the end there 😁
It is true that Alan Sugar predicted that the iPod was a fad that would be dead within a year.
Another beautiful restoration! Congratulations...
This is by far the most awesome unknown computer ever
I am new to your channel, I am surprised you don't have millions of subs! Great content, and quality. Thank you!
Thank you Colin for the kind words. These things take time I guess but the channel is growing with each release so I can't complain 🖒
@@RMCRetro Thank you for the reply
Oh man, I coverted these in the Computer Weekly magazines, back in the day.
I think we saw it advertised, of all places, in ST Format. Or maybe it was just the Argos catalogue? Either way, it seemed like something from another planet, to kids used to a machine that was essentially built around what could be considered a subset of the Megadrive hardware... You mean you get a *full* MD, AND a (seemingly) 3x faster, "32 bit" computer into the bargain? Damn, son. The future is now.
Ok, loved THIS video. Fantastic work Neil.
Cheers Chris!
Great find Neil. Just loved that video and the jokes in the end hahahaa
Quite the interesting concept, especially for that generation. I look forward to the next video in this series!
I remember it back in the day, but I just now realized that it was (and probably is until today) the only computer that actually combined a Z80, a Motorolla 68000 and an 8086 architecture processor on the same machine.
It was the strangest thing to see as a kid in the 90s who owned a MD . A shop in my area had one and batman on it which i couldnt find anywhere else . Made the mega-pc feel pretty surreal to play on
I love all the strange and rare hardware you are able to dig up :)
You know i had always wondered if you could make a pcb card of all consoles ... and plug them into a pc glad to see someone thought about it as well and made this product
best alan sugar impression ever :)
I'm always amazed by the amount of varieties of Mega Drive over any other consoles before or since. Inc the US released Nomad (handheld MD). Plus the MD/MCD and 32X combos. Even Sega were still making it with the Mega LD when they were developing the Saturn.
Nice video. I nearly bought one of these back in the day as Dixon's were clearing them out for a few hundred dollars. Instead I bought a crazy expensive SCSI CD Drive for my Falcon lol.
With impressions like that a career in voice acting looks to be in the offing!
Excellent vid. Really enjoy the nitty-gritty repair aspect. You gained a sub.
Thanks Chris! A lot more repairing coming in pt2 soon 🖒
That Alan Sugar bit at the end was brilliant!
I love your laid back humour when dealing with tech stuff in the cave. :-)
Love it! Thanks for the cleaning guide. I have a Vendex Turbo-888-XT with similar corrosion on the floppy pins. Looks like I will be removing those too!
Thanks William, hang in for part 2 when we give it a much deeper clean and then protect the traces, this is just the first step
This was my first PC. I destroyed it out of stupidity. Regret it to this day. Wish I still had it. Thanks for showing it to the World :)
Something I recently discovered for covering circuit board traces after doing work on them is UV settable solder mask paint. It only costs about AU$2-3 from eBay and is available in multiple colours, including the common green colour. I'd recommend this for anybody's tool kit if they are repairing boards like in this video where they have to scrape off solder mask.
A friend of mine had one if these! I believe he still has it but It was brilliant!
Super awesome video. I look forward to part 2!
Always wanted one of these!
ironically as a kid, I once drew up designs for a Sega Genesis and PC Combo machine (iirc it had a cd-rom drive and modem port)...its funny to find out that they actually existed. Fantastic video as always though
I drew up designs for a laptop that had two touchscreens instead of a keyboard.
That exists too... Although it came about roughly 20 years after I thought of it - I have one nearby.
I mean, it's not a great idea, in practice, but it absolutely does look awesome. XD
(Acer Iconia 6120 in case you're wondering what the 'real' version of the idea is.)
A bunch of companies are on the verge of trying to release new adaptations of the idea though.
Asus has one in the works (they call it project precog)
And Lenovo is working on a small folding screen laptop, which is still conceptually kind of similar...
So... I guess I was less crazy than I thought, if 30 years later, several companies seem hell-bent on getting the idea to work... XD
It's amazing to me that this thing exists! In c+vg there was an April Fools article on something called the "Famstrad", which was like a SNES/Amstrad hybrid. My brother and I would laugh about it throughout the 90's.. completely unaware that Amstrad more or less actually did it haha
Really enjoyed this, thanks! You know what I'd love to see some time? A video about the most prominent computer manufacturer from my childhood: Research Machines. They made computers primarily for schools. I remember starting with the RM Link 380 and 480Z at secondary school before they migrated to RM Nimbus 80186 almost-IBM-compatible machines in the mid 80s. At college I mostly used their PC-AX (I think it was called) which was a 286 machine. Have you ever heard of them?
I live in the USA, and I now want one of these!! Yeah, its only a 386, but its still awesome :)
Worth it alone for the "Spectrum with a toilet". That had me in stitches of laughter 😁
Another great trash to treasure! As a Sega fanboy in Canada, I've always wanted on of these, but have easily talked myself out of it due to import costs haha
I always wanted one of these. Great to see it on your channel.
Ah, the days of playing Wing Commander and then flipping over to Speedball or Desert Strike was special. Yes, I was one who had the 486 variant and (was it?) the 40MB HDD at the time. I think I still have the system somewhere. Come to think about it, I had the PC1512 before it, the CPC6128 and even that funky eMailer such was the thing for all Amstrad back then. Thanks for a little nostalgia.
cool feature with having the PC side stay on while playing an MD game - you could pull up a walk-through or strategy guide for the game on the early internet and then switch back to reference it as needed
At that point in time you'd have been using BBS systems or Usenet to pull early game FAQs :)
This was a great video. I didn't know these even existed and i consider myself knowledgeable in retro tech. So today I learned i'm not all knowing! lol
The sound of the PC's frequency modulation oscillator is very nice.
Really interesting setup! Very impressive and very cool!
I had one of these, back in the day. If only the PC was a little more current, it would have been quite a nice product... You know, for people working from home who like a little "down time", now-and-then. However, this was still a nice, soldered trip down memory lane, for me. Thanks!
You might be able to find a "vga" to component adapter.
Love the humor, just the right amount.
This was the best PC I even owned and I regret selling in the 90s for £50. It wasn't the fastest but it was fun to use. I even had a DOS version of COBOL for it. I think I had it from 93-95, as 95 I got a new job and could afford p75.
The adverts for the Mega PC in Sonic the Comic definitely boasted a 486 SLC "plus" version as available to order for £200 more (or £300 more with a bigger HDD). I used to stare longingly at those ads so can remember them pretty photographically! They were sold by Silica systems, not Amstrad themselves.
Yes they did, but that was THEIR own mod. Amstrad NEVER offered this from the factory.
It was nothing more than a clip-on 486 upgrade.
They just coined the "Plus" moniker as Amstrsd previously used this to denote their upgraded/updated machines.
@@R33Racer I suspected this, especially as it was a 486 SLC and therefore probably the identical motherboard. That's why I specified the adverts were from Silica, rather than Amstrad directly. Thanks for clarifying/confirming my suspicions!
This machine looks like a bit of a nightmare! Alan Sugar was an absolute mad lad for this one!
Never heard of this product before thought I knew all of Amstrads PC's.
To be honest they did not sell that well, this is how one Xmas we managed to get a job lot of 200 of them dirt cheap, and it was Xmas so we flogged them at £199.99 and we sold the lot in about 2 weeks ans we could have moved at least another 100 but we could not get any more stock, but many kids were going to get one of these from Santa that Xmas :)
I'm lucky to have a Mega PC and a working CRT. The PC part isn't that fast, but it's pretty compact and has some nice features like Adlib sound (via the Megadrive card), volume wheel for PC Speaker, ...
Upgradeable VRAM too. The extra ISA slot is useful too.
Plenty of people were buying 386s in 1993. I bought one as a student; the AMD 386DX40 was somewhere between the speed of a 486SX25 and 33, but was over a hundred pounds cheaper than the 486.
I have one of these in my attic including the original monitor. Must dust it off sometime and see if it still works.
You may want to be careful with the purple logo on the front if you retrobrite it. I had a similar thing with a white Sega Saturn where it bleached out the red part of the logo leaving it yellow.
I had one of these back in the day. It definitely came with an Amstrad joystick. The joypad was also the same colour as the PC and Amstrad branded.
Also, you say this has been upgraded with RAM but mine 100% came with 4mb as standard. I got it rather late in its lifespan though so maybe they sold them with more ram later on?
Hmmmm that's interesting perhaps they uprated the spec. I have found some peripherals which you'll see in pt2
Thanks so much for this video, I never knew such a critter existed
I remember seeing one when I was around 12 years old at a computer shop here in Malta.
Any Multi-Sync monitor will do. There are some LCD ones too, try checking Amiga forums.
BenQ make a really nice one but Ebayers are wise to it, selling them at £100. It's a case of getting lucky with the right seller I think
@@RMCRetro Commodore / Amiga monitors of the same vintage should work too, but alas those are very pricey.
Be careful in that Multisync was / is an NEC trademark. As resolutions got higher they started putting the name on monitors that wouldn't go below VGA.
The Alan Sugar moments are made of Techmoan-level sarcasm and sass-practically worth the price of admission. But looking at this PC is great! I was only ever aware of the Sega Saturn PCI card thanks to LGR, and this device is news to me.
Thanks he'll be back for more in part 2! See also the 3DO Blaster which is a 3DO on a card for PCs... also a flop
The Samsung SyncMaster 204 or 204B will handle the 15kHz signals by interpreting them as a 480i resolution. I've been able to use my own Sega Genesis (Megadrive for you) with this monitor and many other older video game consoles over RGB with it with an excellent picture quality.
Who did the Alan Sugar voice-over? :-). That was hilarious 😂 ... West Country London Accent! :-). Great work and an education!! :-)
That would be Andrew D 😂
You just needed a sync combiner to get the Genesis side to work in scart
I have a Terradrive only, always wanted the Amstrad MegaPC, but have an CPC 464 plus
Such a fascinating machine... Very very interesting video 👌
Was there an Amiga-Genesis machine? I mean, with the 68000 Processor, wouldn't be an easy task to combine them?
DUAL CORE !
I think the difficulty would be in sorting out licencing rather than technical. The same reason you can't get a combined Playstation / X Box despite them both using very similar AMD processors.
@@MrDuncl Thank you for the answer... i should figured it out myself... :-)
Great video it’s amazing to see you bring this back to life awesome job
I do remember someone from first school who had one of these. She used it as a lure to get me into her bedroom. I'm not sure it went exactly as planned, I thoroughly enjoyed switching between Sonic and Wolfenstein 3D in the early 90s.
She didn't get any.
Ahh what it was to be 9 years old 🤣
When I worked for Dixons and we were selling these, almost all of them came back within a few months due to a fault. Usually the door would stop switching between the Megadrive and PC. Curiously, and this is a little background on Dixons workings, these were classed as "code 5." In our book of products that contained all our items, product codes and prices etc they would also have a repair code. Code 1 meant the customer has to arrange an engineer to come out to the house. Code 2 was send it away to Disastercare...I mean Mastercare. Code 5 meant just swap the damn thing and send the faulty one back to the warehouse. I guess even Dixons couldn't be bothered to repair them.
Wow I saw one of these in a magazine when I was a kid, I really wanted one!
Off topic but I have seen a IBM PS2 386 out perform an IBM compatible 486. Both running Windows 95.
I'm not an expert but i think IBM's PS2 machines used an internal bus called MCA or Micro Channel Architecture which was different from the usual ISA (Industrial Standard Architecture); perhaps this difference in the buses made the PS2 machines more efficient. Hopefully an expert will see this and correct me.
386DX40 would be faster than a 486SX25 for example. The 486 in itself wasn't a huge leap in performance until they started increasing the internal clock
@@ubergeeknz On the micro channel bus a 386 33mhz was faster than a 75mhz 486 on a IBM compatible.
@@overtaxed79 I can believe it
@@ubergeeknz it saw it with my very eyes my friend made it a point to show off his full size IBM PS2 386 vs his mid tower 486. I was in awe, at the PS2 this was back in 1998, but the year is irrelevant.
Amazing! I wonder if that mega drive card could work when put into a completely different computer...
I just wondered the same thing...
I'm thinking the monitor passthrough cable looks like it might be trouble though....
If the passthrough cable was sending nothing more than a VGA signal it could be adapted easily, although idk if that is exactly what it's sending
Man, this is ambitious. Could you imagine doing this 5 years ago?
Like running Linux on the PlayStation.
Wait wait, what is that edge connector underneath the cartridge slot?
Hehe you'll see more in pt2, but it serves the same purpose as the real Mega Drive